Yes, the ending of The Skeleton Key is kind of a bummer. Think of it as social justice from beyond the grave.
The luminous Kate Hudson headlines as Caroline, a big-hearted hospice care worker hired to look after catatonic Ben Devereaux (John Hurt), a senior citizen sucking his last few breaths in a decaying plantation house somewhere in the Louisiana bayou.
Caroline’s routine is not made any easier by the presence of Ben’s overbearing wife Grace (Gena Rowlands), who rules the swampy mansion with an iron will in service to an arcane agenda.
Director Iain Softley (Hackers, Backbeat) and writer Ehren Kruger (The Ring, Scream 3) successfully stitch-up a scary Southern gothic, placing the very curious Caroline smack-dab in the middle of a mystery that will test her to the limits, and then some.
Softley deftly guides his camera through keyholes and tumbling tumblers as Caroline unlocks the secrets of a blighted house, mostly kept in the attic. It could be argued that she makes a few too many discoveries for her own good.
John Hurt has no dialogue, yet his face is required to reveal multiple layers of unexpressed anguish, as a man who literally hasn’t a clue how he got here. Gena Rowlands, who recently passed away, is highly animated as a mad matriarch wielding sorcerous formulas to prolong her already very long life.
As previously noted, the finale of The Skeleton Key is decidedly downbeat—until we consider the context of the tragic events that caused the curse. Then, maybe, it’s not so bad.
While you sort out your feelings, please enjoy this crackerjack feature.
I watched Late Night with the Devil, but it didn’t bring me any joy. A far more effective version of hell breaking loose on the telly can be found in Ghostwatch a BBC mockumentary that originally aired on Halloween night, 1992.
Apparently Ghostwatch was so realistic that many citizens were fooled into thinking something truly paranormal was unfolding before their astonished eyes, and network censors vowed never to rerun it on the BBC, accusing the creators of “a deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of dread.”
Cool beans! Sign me up!
The made-for-TV movie was written by Steven Volk and directed by Lesley Manning, and it follows a large team of 1990s-style BBC reporters and crew onsite at a very normal looking home in Foxhill, that’s been the scene of serious poltergeist activity.
We meet the unfortunate inhabitants of the house, Pamela Early (Brid Brennan), and her two traumatized daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kimmy (Cherise Wesson).
From the studio, the veteran presenter (Michael Parkinson), a stodgy old skeptic, coordinates the various segments, including live reports from the haunted house, interviews with the beleaguered family, and assorted talking heads adding their two cents worth to the proceedings.
What elevates Ghostwatch is its organic flow from spooky fun to impending danger to an unearthly tele-event, as a very compelling guest crashes the “live broadcast” for a few announcements and a guest editorial.
The pacing is superbly handled and the characters behave as real humans probably would in the presence of a particularly evil entity.
Kurt Russell’s kid, Wyatt Russell, stars as an ailing baseball player who lucks into a house with a magic swimming pool.
Unfortunately, his family may not survive a comeback.
I went into Night Swim under the impression that it was a goofy monster-in-the-drain romp, accompanied by a heavy body count, but writer-director Bryce McGuire threw me a curveball.
Instead, it’s a movie about hope and how misplaced faith in miracles can be a dangerous thing. It also does a very credible job of capturing the joy and terror of owning a backyard pool.
A swimming pool used to be a mighty source of entertainment for the entire family, with a few short breaks for potato chips and kool-aid. Got a jar of change? Kids will dive after dimes all goddamn day.
A child’s introduction to liquid immersion is a unique feeling that goes back to the womb. Weightless, wet, wonderful, intoxicating, and frightening—it’s a different dimension that can play tricks on our senses.
McGuire makes fertile use of those familiar sensations, shooting every scrap of action from multiple angles for an extra slow and scary fun slide into the dark tank.
The title taps into the curious dread that comes with nocturnal aquatics, the feeling of not knowing how deep the deep end goes, and the uncertain possibility that you’re not alone in the pool.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Hollywood film about a swimming pool without the ancient game of Marco Polo being involved. Do they really play this antique pastime in the 21st century?
I’m skeptical.
Night Swim also includes the obligatory Camel Fight sequence, and sure enough, people escape death by a hair’s breadth. Having once been pinned to the bottom of a pool during a losing Camel Fight, I can confirm that this is the sort of horseplay that can ruin everyone’s good time.
Through a magical editing process, Frogman brings together all the filmed components of a quest to locate a legendary cryptid that allegedly inhabits the swampier suburbs of Loveland, Ohio.
Amateur filmmaker and daydreamer Dallas Kyle (Nathan Tymochuk) is worried that his career peaked as a child, when he snapped a photograph of a mysterious amphibian creature while on a trip with his parents.
It happened near Loveland, Ohio, a small town that stays afloat financially by luring v-loggers, podcasters, documentarians, and other media soakers to have a look around for their slimy mascot.
Tired of the world at large perceiving him as a kooky kid with a camera, Dallas decides to go back to Loveland and shoot a hard-hitting documentary about the Loveland Frogman.
Accompanying Dallas is his wedding photographer drinking buddy, Scottie (Benny Barrett), and his longtime friend and secret crush, Amy (Chelsey Grant), who is ostensibly on her way to Los Angeles to become an actress.
Inspired by Dallas’s passion to create something meaningful, the trio saddles up and checks in at a charming Loveland B&B run by Gretel (Chari Eckmann), an enthusiastic dame who acts as an unofficial tour guide for all things related to the Frogman.
As we see all too often, a lark expedition with three friends turns into a very nasty little trip (trap).
It’s easy enough to classify Frogman as a found-footage descendant of The Blair Witch Project, as it sticks to the interview-vs-wilderness template pretty closely.
If we look back to the earlier part of the previous century, it also bears some resemblance to Lovecraft’s Shadow Over Innsmouth, in which a nameless tourist stumbles into a dilapidated fishing village populated by folks with an unsettling “batrachian” appearance.
I believe writer-director Anthony Cousins purposely designed Frogman to dig deeper and bite harder than Blair Witch. It definitely establishes a darker shade of horror, especially after the viewer pieces together all the awful implications.
George C. Scott in an understated role as a classical composer bedeviled by spooks in Seattle? It’s true!
I reviewed The Changeling upon its release for my high school newspaper, wherein I declared it “really scary.”
More than 40 years later, I am revising my opinion. Sometimes “scary” doesn’t age well. But then, neither do I.
Ivory tickler John Russell (GCS) is a recent widower, having lost wife and daughter in a wintery road accident. He takes a teaching job at a small college in Washington state to hopefully get his head together and start composing again.
Instead, the massive mansion generously rented to him by Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere, his real-life wife) from the local historical society, comes with a ghost in the attic that wastes no time banging around upstairs, depriving the maestro of much-needed rest.
A seance arranged by Claire with a psychic couple confirms the presence of a restless child murdered in the house, and it becomes Russell’s mission to bring metaphysical justice to the situation.
Director Peter Hyams (The Relic, Time Cop), a thoroughly capable and professional filmmaker, does a thoroughly capable and professional job on The Changeling.
The problem isn’t him, it’s me.
I suppose a scene in which a possessed antique wheelchair chases Claire around the upper floors of the mansion was sufficient to make teenaged me go, “eek!”
Since then, I’ve logged thousands of hours of community service watching ghosts, ghouls, creatures, cruel killers, and assorted hell-spawn ravaging their way through humanity.
The Changeling, even with its star cast and engaging mystery, comes off as quaint and dated. Weak tea and dry toast.
It’s not simply an age thing. A masterpiece of atmosphere such as Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) requires nothing more than sound and camera movement to convince us that the supernatural world is all around us.
The Great Scott, who does not bellow, growl, or bloviate, is convincing as Russell, a (literally) haunted man vulnerable/receptive to unseen forces, due to the fresh tragedy in his life.
Though Hyams, Scott, et al, give it the old college try, their collective efforts fail to generate any genuine shock wattage in the 21st century.
I’ve been a fan of Edgar Wright from his earliest work on Spaced, the hilarious BBC sit-com from the tail-end of the previous century.
This foundational series teamed director Wright with writer/actor Simon Pegg, a partnership that flourished with ace collaborations like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007).
Pegg is certainly the more visible of the two, appearing in high-profile film franchises based on TV shows from the 1960s, Star Trek and Mission Impossible.
In Last Night In Soho, Wright’s musically minded, bloody Valentine to swinging London, he affirms his true love (and understanding) of those riotous times through masterful manipulation of color, sound, and movement in telling the story of two girls from different eras whose lives overlap in Dreamland.
We open with Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a spirited lass from Cornwall with dreams of being a 60s-inspired fashion designer in London.
Upon landing in the big city, Eloise is treated rudely by her designing classmates to the point that she’s forced to abandon the dorms in favor of lodging with Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg) a lovely old-lady landlord who doesn’t allow male guests after 8pm.
Soon after acquiring the new digs, Eloise begins a dream odyssey about the adventures of Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), a live-wire hip chick who captures the attention of everyone she meets during her meteoric ascent in London’s nightclub scene, circa 1965.
Coincidentally, it’s the very same historical period that Eloise obsesses about through her clothes and music. Cilla Black, Kinks, Chad & Jeremy, and Petula Clark can be heard plugging away on the phonograph, while her attempts at creating swing silhouettes and bubble dresses are clearly influenced by Mary Quant and other Carnaby Street regulars.
Eloise and Sandy overlap in these subconscious interludes: Sandy is portrayed by Taylor-Joy, but whenever an opportunity for a reflection appears, it’s McKenzie looking back at the action.
A lesser director would milk this device as a gimmick. Wright uses it to set the story to a fevered rhythm, as Sandy, a beautiful rising star, sees her ambition smashed to bits by horrible old men.
When not living her dream, Eloise styles herself as the beguiling Sandy, until the viewer loses her sense of identity in both the sleeping and waking worlds.
Last Night in Soho is a rise-and-fall fable that kicks off with a dazzling bang, and shifts gears into a sordid nightmare spiral that’s grim going indeed.
Wright’s poise and whirlwind finesse with the camera is thoroughly transportive, evoking both delirious highs and utter misery in strikingly composed scene after scene.
This is a bumpy ride, but Last Night In Soho is more than worth it. Instead of grousing about getting the rug yanked out from under, we should be thankful that an artist of Wright’s ability has fully materialized in our present day.
Funny thing, I went to the theater and saw this when it came out. I remember liking it well enough, but Prince of Darkness is a relatively small-scale production for John Carpenter.
His previous run of films included Halloween, The Thing, The Fog, Escape From New York, and Big Trouble In Little China, so perhaps I was missing the star power typically provided by Kurt Russell and Jamie Lee Curtis.
The real reason, I now suspect, is that Prince of Darkness is more akin to Carpenter’s earlier, grittier Assault on Precinct 13, a no-name thriller about cops fighting off a crowd of vengeful gang members while trapped in a shuttered police station.
The cast of Prince of Darkness, including vintage TV stars Jameson Parker (Simon & Simon), Thom Bray (Riptide) and Dirk Blocker (son of Dan Blocker/Hoss), are similarly under siege, this time by a seemingly synchronized horde of hobo schizophrenics led by a menacing Alice Cooper.
Carpenter’s resident authority figure Donald Pleasence plays Father Loomis (Doctor Loomis’s twin brother?), a nervous priest who discovers an infernal device in the basement of an abandoned Los Angeles church.
The ancient artifact, which resembles a moldy lava lamp, appears to contain some kind of organic material that’s rapidly developing consciousness after lying dormant for untold centuries.
Loomis calls in Professor Birack (Victor Wong, Egg Shen from Big Trouble) and a group of his top physics students to study the strange canister and possibly decipher the accompanying doomsday grimoire also found on the premises.
How could they know they’d be hastening the return of the titular character, even providing a human vessel for its gestation period?
Nope, didn’t see that one coming.
I would expect college students to be dopey enough to take on this insane extra-credit assignment, but distinguished scientists?
All hell proceeds to break loose, as the assembled eggheads fall victim to having unholy water squirted in their faces from newly made zombies, or getting torn apart by the mute mob of street people that have surrounded the accursed church.
Professor Birack and the increasingly agitated Loomis deduce that the evil essence contained in the canister is now fully awake and influencing people on a subatomic level. Like ants working together toward a common goal.
You get it? Carpenter? Ants?
Carpenter is at his most diabolical depicting a wounded world, teeming with swarms of furious insects, that’s clearly reached end time, requiring an act of selfless sacrifice to save the day and keep the devil—and his creeping minions—away.
The dour final frame of Prince of Darkness indicates that he won’t be gone for long. A hell of a movie.
Amazon Prime temptingly offers the opportunity to pig-out on obscure and overlooked horror television from every port of call imaginable. After a bit of grazing. I’d highly recommend From, a series filmed in Nova Scotia that’s captured the imagination of myself and Mrs. Sharky.
It should ring several bells if you’re a fan of Lost, The Walking Dead, and Wayward Pines, as a four-pack family unit drives its RV into one of those cursed communities that you can never leave.
To make matters worse, everybody has to be inside and locked down before darkness falls, because monsters (kind of like vampires, kind of like zombies) come out of the woods at night seeking to gain entry into the town’s various residences to murder and mutilate the town’s various residents.
The pale whispering ghouls surround a home, endlessly cajoling and compelling its occupants to throw open their doors so they can be properly displayed as part of a gruesome tableaux come the morning.
On the upside, houses are free, but you might have to clean up the viscera from the most recent undead onslaught.
Still a good deal, if you ask me. I bet it’s cheaper than Salem’s Lot.
Vehicles arrive from a disparate assortment of starting points, and after an interval of freaking out, travelers must decide whether they want to reside in the town itself, under the severe protection of Sheriff Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau), or find some floor space with the free-loving bohemians of Colony House, where the Sheriff’s brooding, model-handsome son Ellis (Corteon Moore) holds court.
The two camps represent humanity as ludicrously polarized despite a shared goal of not wanting to end up as chew toys for a mob of malevolent entities.
Series creator John Griffin does a stellar job of knitting hard horror elements into a character-driven show. The creatures that stalk the populace of this nameless community aren’t driven by a biological need to feed.
They’re just evil and cruel!
The cast of “castaways” on From range from complaining assholes to compassionate caretakers, including a tech bro, an amusement park engineer and his traumatized family, an unstable clergyman, a spooky waitress with voices in her head, and a crayon-coloring man child who’s been exiled in this particular limbo the longest.
As for the bigger picture, Boyd and company must solve the mystery of how they all got there and devise methods of escape from a location that isn’t on any map.
But as one character says bitterly, “We’re not on Gilligan’s Island. We can’t fix the radio with coconuts.”
From keeps enough intriguing subplots at play (e.g., where is the electricity coming from?) to reel in even the casual viewer. At present, there are only two seasons available.
I’ve seen the first one and I’m completely hooked.
The inevitable comparisons to Lost are well warranted. Executive producers Jack Bender and Jeff Pinkner both worked on that genre-defying show.
Perhaps they belong to the same universe? I’ll know more after my next season session.
Editor’s Note: The addictive theme song to From is a minor-key, dirge arrangement of “Que Sera Sera,” performed by the Pixies, that sounds like Lee Hazlewood.
If you’ve ever remarked aloud words to the effect of “this job is killing me,” then perhaps you can understand the kind of hell that protagonist Gilderoy (Toby Jones) faces in Berberian Sound Studio, a meticulously unnerving film by Peter Strickland.
Gilderoy is a sound editor for movies, recognized internationally as a true artisan in a mostly vulgar industry. He takes an assignment in Italy that turns out to be a lurid horror movie about the Inquisition, and finds himself at odds with everyone around him, including the raging director (Cosimo Fusco), a playboy producer (Antonio Mancino), and various unhappy actresses who complain that they haven’t been paid.
Time is measured fitfully. Gilderoy, feeling more trapped every day, is unable to get reimbursed for his airfare by a sneering secretary (Tonia Sotiropoulo), forcing him into a captivity spent devising gruesome sound effects for a movie about (mainly) torture and screaming women.
We are witness to countless taping sessions of chopping, stabbing, boiling, and mutilating many pounds of fruits and vegetables, which never seem to get cleaned up, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at a studio full of moldy produce.
And it appears the mold is growing in direct proportion to the increasing torment depicted in the film being made, which the viewer never sees.
Meanwhile, actresses continue to scream in the sound booth. The director isn’t remotely satisfied with anyone’s terror level, and bullies the hapless audio supervisor into turning things up a bit.
Not surprisingly, the mild-mannered and repressed Gilderoy begins to lose his grip on reality, cheered only by an occasional letter from his mother. Even these become sinister as the days roll by, as if the carnage he helps create in this cursed Italian production has infected every branch in his life.
Writer-director Peter Strickland has cunningly fabricated a stinging slow-burner about the frailty of the creative spirit and how the battle between art and crass commercialism can cost you your very soul—not unlike say, Barton Fink.
Berberian Sound Studio plays out as a hypnotic and haunting collage of rolling tapes, clipping VU meters, and the turning of knobs, all of which contribute to a very soft man’s ruin, brilliantly realized by veteran stage actor Toby Jones (also sublime in The Detectorists), with whom we sympathize every awful step.
It’s also a “way homer” and worth the time it takes to puzzle over. I’m still thinking on it.
I’m going to make a bold prediction that Dark Harvest becomes a Halloween movie-night staple.
Alternately luminous and vicious, Dark Harvest is a captivating adaptation of Norman Partridge’s 2006 novel about a cursed small town that must destroy a local monster every time the calendar hits October 31.
In a seasonal swash of ultra violence, the legendary Sawtooth Jack, a pumpkin-headed demon, rises from the cornfield and is hunted by a posse of hungry high school boys. Jack must be killed before the church bells chime midnight, or the community will be plagued by storms and misfortune for an entire year.
It’s a tradition, you understand.
At harvest time, the boys from the local senior class are locked up for three days without food so they’re properly motivated to bring down Sawtooth Jack, a frightening and deadly foe that is nonetheless loaded with candy.
Director David Slade and writer Michael Gilio conjure magic, madness, and terror in a coming-of-age tale that pounces on the viewer like a midnight collaboration between Ray Bradbury (luminous) and Joe Lansdale (vicious)—with a bit of Hunger Games thrown in after some focus-group input.
Editor’s Note: The kids attend Bradbury High School.
Dark Harvest could have used more exposition and context, but the fevered sepia-toned sights of raving teenagers versus an uncanny enemy, is first-rate cinematic mayhem that actually does justice to its literary origins.
Make it a welcome addition to your annual festival of fright films, m’kay?
horrificflicks.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.